Overview

This topic provides basic assistance in reading NBU logs, guidance on the use of the Symantec vxlogview utility, and identifies some common PTT/NDMP problems seen by Support.

Reading NBU Logs

You can browse to and open the admin, bptm and ndmp logs in the directories that are identified in Increase Log Level and Gather NBU Logs . The content of the NBU files will be in the form of the date MMDDYY.txt.

Wordpad will not be able to open the log files if they are in use, use Notepad if the files are in use. On some systems Notepad doesn't display the files correctly if this occurs copy the files to another location and open them with Wordpad.

Get the time frame for the failed duplication, using the time of the failed duplication search the log files for events within that time frame.
Using the admin log search for Direct Copy, if the NBU debug level was set to 5 the logs will contain messages explaining why Direct Copy failed

Below is list of some PTT/NDMP problems and possible cause of the failure:

No NDMP read path – Check the device monitor in NBU and verify that all paths are up. Use the bptm logs to locate error messages with details for the downed drives.
Data buffer mismatch – A backup was created using one buffer size, the attempted NBU duplication used a different buffer size.
IP address higher than 128.x.x.x – An NBU bug causes an error when using a valid IP address of the DXi. While the IP address is valid NBU mangles the address used for the Data connect session. The IP address that NetBackup was attempting to use in the case where this was discovered was 127.255.255.255, which was found in the ndmp debug logs on both the DXi system and NBU.
The backup images were created using multiplexing – NBU 7.0.1 now supports Direct Copy with multiplexed images, this functionality has not been verified by Quantum IVT test.

The admin and bptm logs are in readable format with an intuitive time stamp.

Using the Symantec vxlogview utility to view NDMP logs

The NDMP logs use the NBU unified format. To understand the logs and timestamp information you must use the vxlogview utility. Each unified process uses an originator ID, the ID for ndmp is 151.

Using the id for ndmp the following command syntax will allow you to read the ndmp logs:

<installDir>\NetBackup\bin\vxlogview –p 51216 –o 151

Here are some examples of how to best use the vxlogview command to read the ndmp logs:

To grab ndmp logs from the previous 5 minutes issue the following command:

<installDir>\NetBackup\bin\vxlogview –p 51216 –o 151 –t 00:05:00 > ndmp5.txt

To read ndmp logs for a specified time frame choose the start and end time of a specific duplication job and use the time and date format shown in the folowing example:

<installDir>\NetBackup\bin\vxlogview –p 51216 –o 151 –b "01/11/2011 5:31 PM" –e "01/11/2011 5:36 PM" > ndmpDupJob.txt

Note: Vxlogview cannot be used for the admin and bptm logs.

What's Next?

Configuring and Testing PTT with NetBackup (NBU) >